ICTP Director K.R. Sreenivasan is among 72 new members of the US National Academy of Sciences. The announcement was given at the NAS annual meeting on 1 May.

Applications are now available for fellowships to earn a Laurea Magistralis in Fisica and Laurea Magistralis in Astrofisica e Fisica Spaziale, under a joint programme sponsored by ICTP and the University of Trieste. A limited number of fellowships are being offered to students from the developing world. For additional information and application forms, please see this page.

Pierre-Gilles de Gennes, Nobel Laureate in Physics 1991, died on 18 May at Orsay, France. He was 74. De Gennes visited ICTP as lecturer seven times between 1968 and 2006. He first came to the Centre to participate in the International Symposium on Contemporary Physics, which marked the official opening of the ICTP Main Building. He last came in 2006 to deliver a special seminar on “Some Thoughts on Friction.”

Stanley L. Miller, an emeritus professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego, whose laboratory experiments in 1952 demonstrated how simple organic compounds considered necessary for the origin of life could have been synthesized on the Earth, died on 20 May. He was 77. Miller came to ICTP twice, in 2000 and 2003, as a guest speaker in the conferences on the origin of life. The conference in 2003 included a celebration on the 50th anniversary of Miller’s experiment at the University of Chicago that confirmed life could indeed be created by chemical synthesis.

ICTP has organized the Africa Day, a one-day symposium to discuss the role that the international institutions in Trieste can play in addressing Africa’s issues. The proceedings will be held in the ICTP Main Lecture Hall on Thursday 31 May, beginning at 9 a.m.

The 2007 ICTP Prize in honour of Lev Davidovich Landau has been awarded to Mohammad Mahdi Sheikh-Jabbari, Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics, Tehran, Iran. Sheikh-Jabbari is being honoured “for his important contributions to non-commutative field theories in the context of D-branes and superstring theories, leading to interesting formal and phenomenological developments in theoretical and mathematical physics.” The 2007 ICTP Prize is named after the great Russian physicist L.D. Landau, Nobel Laureate 1962. The 100th year of his birth will be celebrated in 2008. The awards ceremony shall be held at a later date.

Jagadish Shukla, who was instrumental in the creation of ICTP’s weather and climate research activities and then led the activities from their inception in 1988 until 1997, has been awarded the International Meteorological Organization (IMO) Prize by the 59th session of the Executive Council of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), held in Geneva, Switzerland, last week. Shukla is currently president, Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), Maryland, and distinguished professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.